On the forefront in the advances of the home entertainment industry is the emergence of multimedia sources available to a new generation of home entertainment systems, namely, convergence systems. PCs, TVs, DVDs, CD players, EPGs, etc., are being converged into one system, providing users a broad spectrum of home entertainment. What is lacking, however, is the capability to view the voluminous information associated with this myriad of media sources in one coherent user interface.
In merging components into one system (i.e., PCs, TVs, DVDs, EPGs, etc.), convergence systems contain several different media source types. For example, PCs contain information in several different file formats (i.e., .ini, .txt, .exe, etc.), Electronic Program Guides, or EPGs, contain information for current and future television programming, and the Internet contains a plethora of information on virtually every subject. As more components are added to convergence systems, new media source types are generated, forcing the user to utilize a plurality of different user interfaces to cull through large quantities of available information for the desired information.
For example, when a user wants to locate a file on a personal computer, the user must open a local search tool that will first search for files and then list the found files by name, date, extension, etc. Advanced searches for content contained within files may be performed; however, depending on the efficiency of the system and the types of files searched, the user could be left with lengthy wait times for search results that may produce useless information.
In another example of searching across multiple media source types, suppose a user wanted to locate the TV channel on which a sporting event is airing and further wanted to listen to a radio or Internet broadcast of the sporting event in lieu of listening to the TV announcers. Current search methods would prompt the user to open an EPG, locate the event, and further open a web browser and/or search engine of some sort to locate an Internet address or a radio broadcast station covering the sporting event, forcing the user to switch between applications to access desired information.
A further shortcoming of present systems is the inability to provide data that is representative across all media source types. For example, suppose a user used a web browser and a search engine to locate information about a movie and wanted to further find the movie's soundtrack, a website for the movie, or a pay-per-view cable channel airing the movie. In this scenario, the user would have to make a separate inquiry using an appropriate media user interface to find the desired information. Further, given that the user is utilizing a convergence system, the search would not provide information relating to the current availability of resources within the system, such as CDs, DVDs, games, etc.
Since convergence systems do not provide users searchable information across all media types, they fall short of total convergence of resources. Therefore, what is needed is a system, user interface, software, method, and signal enabling a user to search for information across all media source types using a single interface.